Growth and experience coincide along a spectrum, a spectrum that people shunt along – at times obliviously, at other times conscientiously – backwards and forwards, until it or the person dissolves, blinking emptily at life’s end.
Along our way, the positions people find themselves growing into and regressing from serve as an aperture onto their accumulating and disintegrating experience, an aperture that now dilates and later constricts according to a certain logic inscribed along the spectrum. This is what experience affords when it drags its chains.
On the left there is the tendency to take apart the various phases of a life, to step back at half-breathe and attempt to cope, to digest from the relative safety of a paused vantage point; dissecting experiences in this way promotes a sense of growth through stages, of pre-structured development.
Moving toward this tendency turns the world into block form, into discrete items––link on a chain that we visit and that visit us; in a word, this tendency is refined, well defined.
Opposed to this tendency, to the right, is one that compresses phases into each other, conservative to the extreme it is incapable of breathing in its manic substitution of coping with comprehension, of healing with further destruction, never from a paused state but one that is ceaselessly dynamic; melding experiences in this way, hurling them pell-mell against and off another promotes a sense of un-staged growth, of steadily cohering fate.
Moving toward this tendency turns the world fluid, injecting vitality into its progression––melting links into uninterrupted columns, a progression that excludes identity; in a word, this tendency is repetitive, immanently definitive.
One tendency amasses a stock of discrete anecdotes, the other a perpetually unfinished tale-in-the-making.
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These are abstract – and unoriginal – formulations, but I think they touch on tendencies in everyone that I know. Where does one belong and when? How does she cope with trauma? Does he recede, take stock––or does she plough on, blurring experiences with one another? Does he prefer to have a past as distinct from his present, which in turn is opened up onto a future that he hopes to control––or does her present incessantly play back her past, does it fill her with a terrible anxiety about repetitions to come? Does she make a mistake in order to learn from it––or does he make one only to do it again and again and again?
Everyone has had the experience of intimacy with one person while hallucinating the face another; and I do not have in mind pathetic fantasies, but the compulsion (!) to literally see a face you might not want to see––or that you do not know you want to see. How do you respond to this? Do you pursue intimacy all the more ardently, do you force the faces into one, or do you recoil, claiming that you are not yet ready, that your past needs to be sorted out, examined and understood?
Either way, being faced with one’s end – death, for dramatic effect – is not a matter of comprehending the end of their life, but the end of its current phase, their year’s projects, this or that month’s procedures, it’s week’s repetitive requirements, the unfolding days’ distractions, the hour’s anxieties, your minute’s ignorance, and each passing second’s heartbeat––all these accumulate as endless micro-deaths, and we grieve over our grief just as blood leaves and enters the heart.
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And always the question is which tendency has taken the wheel. Because these tendencies, these categories are important for thinking about – and rethinking, I stress – one’s life; and anyone who says they fall on one side of the line is too optimistic. After all, growth and experience are themselves fluctuating and variable––like a heart that not only contracts and dilates, but that grows and shrinks from what its aperture reveals: we ceaselessly fall back and move forward from childish and mature states––and which (or, rather, when) is either choice childish or mature?
idiotic investigations 